A LANGUAGE MADE OF BLOOD

HERE, BULLET
By Brian Turner
80 pp. Paperback.
Alice James Books. $14.95.

Reviewed by H. R. Coursen

The coffins return. An occasional forbidden photograph shows them lined up in a warehouse. The flag industry thrives, as does the company that manufactures Purple Hearts. The administration’s desperate effort to drive the current war underground has succeeded. That’s why it has become so unpopular so quickly. Repression is a psychological technique that never works. In October 2005, the military returned to the “body count” approach in the face of the resistance in Iraq. When a country uses the production of corpses as a criterion of success, our models become Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao, and Pol Pot. And Bush says of our people who have died in Iraq: “We must honor their sacrifice.” How? By more deaths. We heard similar words during the war in Vietnam.

The twentieth century produced world wars and response to them. Balaclava had given us the Light Brigade and Tennyson’s “someone had blundered.” But that was an isolated episode clothed in heroic stupidity. Whitman gave us “Cavalry Crossing a Ford,” a brilliant description of the American Civil War, the first photographed war and the first modern war, in that the bodies were just stacked up like wood once their assaults on fortified positions had exhausted their tidal pressure. The classic from that conflict is Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, though Crane was not a veteran and used football as his analogy for battle. World War I gave us Hemingway and Remarque and Wilfred Owen. The latter, an elegant young poet turned infantry officer, deployed his craft toward descriptions of the butchery of the Western Front. Owen’s description of a gas attack, in which one soldier cannot get his mask on in time, makes Horace’s “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country” an “old lie.” The literature of World War II could not match that of its predecessor. It could not provide the shock that Hemingway’s Catherine Barkley experiences when she expects that her lover might suffer a saber wound. “They blew him all to bits.” The war gave us James Jones and Norman Mailer and a wonderful poet, Keith Douglas, who, like Owen, was killed in action. Owen (1893–1918) was killed a week before the Armistice. Douglas (1920–1944) died on D-Day. Vietnam provides us with the haunted eyes of its veterans, among us today. As Maine poet and Vietnam veteran Doug Rawlings says, “If your nightmares wait until nighttime, you are a survivor.” But you can see the nightmare already forming in those eyes.

Brian Turner becomes the poet of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” If his Here, Bullet has a master metaphor, it is of the human body into which the bullet enters and the human brain that the memory of war penetrates, to become an indelible part of mind. Over and over again, the war is “hunting for souls” by seeking for “bone and gristle and flesh” to produce “just enough blood to drown in.” Or, if wounds are survived, “Rockets often fall / in the night sky of the skull, down long avenues / of the brain’s myelin sheathing, over synapses / and the rough structures of thought…” As many veterans know, thought is no antidote to the deeper impression that war makes. Amid the after-concussion of the bombing, “Allah must wander in the crowd / as I do, dazed…” Also wandering, like the shade of Homer’s Patroclus, are “The ghosts of American soldiers… unsure of their way home.” One of the best poems in this gripping collection is “The Baghdad Zoo.” Here, merely by describing the depredations of escaped animals—the demise of some and the bewilderment of others—Turner captures the jungle we have evoked in Iraq and evokes the “rough beast” of Yeats’s nightmare “The Second Coming ”: “Eaten down to their skeletons, the giraffes / looked prehistoric, unreal, their necks / too fragile, too graceful for the 21st century.” Here, the birds are not frightened by the flexing of the thigh muscles of a stony Sphinx, but “by the rotorwash / of Blackhawk helicopters touching down.” Nothing is graceful here. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld says, “Stuff happens.” One thing that happens is that sleep is a different version of wakefulness, when what we see but cannot know during the day knows us, “the way dreams burn in the oilfields of night.”

Turner blends the gleaming oil and blood into the fluid pressure of experiences that no one should have but that too many do have. His laconic, understated style insists that we approach, through language, the terrible things being done in our name—to us, as well as to the soldiers and to the people of Iraq. The words slide in and out of consciousness, which is always partial. Some part of the mind in combat will not admit that it is there, even if the soldier is moving methodically through the processes of battle—particularly then, since training takes over. It must. But the mind is recording all of this, and the retribution is intense. Euripides was probably the first to demonstrate the effects of what battle does to the mind in showing Hercules, returned to his family after defeating many monsters, suddenly killing his wife and children. I, for one, deeply resent that so few of those who are generating the corpses have ever been in uniform.

It is an old story. A companion to this splendid collection is Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam (Atheneum, 1994), a study of what that war did to its participants. One veteran says, “It was better to fight communism there in Vietnam than in your own backyard.” Sound familiar? How can we have fallen so soon for the same lie?

Shay uses Homer and Shakespeare as his sources. Turner’s work adds vividly to the sad record.
I recommend a slow and careful reading. Be prepared for some pain.

 

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